We are happy and proud to announce that the FISH FACE project won the People's Choice Award in the Google Impact Challenge Australia 2016! Since another project, the Great Barrier Reef Foundation, got as many votes as FISH FACE, Google decided to award both projects the extra 500 000 AUD funding.

We are very excited to announce that our Fish Face project is one of 10 finalists in the Google Impact Challenge: Australia! With your vote the project can become one of the winners and receive an additional 500 000 AUD to develop our technology further!

A world without fish is a world without food for half of the world's population. By collecting more data about fish species, age and behaviour in an automated way, we will know more about fish populations and enable a more sustainable fishing. The world needs it - we need it!

The Fish Face project is mainly run by The Nature Conservancy, a world wide environmental organisation, who has access to the fisheries and the expertise knowledge about the fish. The other two project members are we at Refind - proud providers of recognition technology and app development for the automated data collection - and Seth Heine, an entrepreneurial leader with sustainability as the main interest.

Voting is now underway to choose an overall winner to receive extra prize money from Google to further develop FishFace. If you’d like to support a move to sustainable fisheries around the world and keep fish in the sea, vote for FishFace now and help it win. Voting ends at midnight (ADST) October 25, 2016.

We’re also really encouraged that the Australian Government’s Australian Fisheries Management Authority (AFMA) has agreed to share its data to help build the machine learning engine that will be the power behind FishFace.

As a part of their recurring theme 'Women in Recycling', Recycling International has now discovered our woman at Refind - Johanna Reimers. Read the interview here, and look at their website for all other news within the recycling business!

We are happy to announce our latest sale - of a new product to a new customer - an OBS200 that goes to Elektro Recycling in Slovakia! The OBS200 will be a smaller version of the OBS600, capable of sorting 200 kg/hour, with a smaller footprint and price tag, but just as high sorting quality!

Our latest product family member is born - the desktop grader! It is a smaller and more flexible version of the e-grader equipment, narrowed down to a smartphone and a light tunnel which enables instant identification through a mobile app.

As a customer, you install the desktop grader and help building up the image database for your needs. Once the classifier is ready for use, you pay a license fee based on number of classifications. The desktop grader can also be turned into a sorting equipment similar to the e-grader, by adding conveyor belts and separation actuators.

We are happy to announce that Refind are involved in a large fishing data collection project, Fish Face, together with The Nature Conservancy. The software from Refind will be used to identify fish species.

Without proper data, fish can't be sustainable managed. But a new technology could change all of that.

Fish stocks around the world are declining—with an estimated 90 percent of the world’s fisheries over or fully exploited. In developing countries, like Indonesia, the decline of a fishery can have severe consequences—as nearly 40 percent of the Indonesian population lives just above the poverty line, fishing is a way of life and provides an important food source for millions of people.

A key challenge in addressing overfishing is the lack of data on just how many fish still exist. Especially in complex multi-species fisheries, like the ones in Indonesia and in many other tropical developing countries, data just doesn’t exist on all types and sizes of individual fish, making sound management almost impossible. In fact, some 90% of fisheries globally are lacking in stock assessment data. Traditional stock assessment methods are prohibitively expensive, and in the majority of fisheries in the developing world, the condition of stocks is not known.

Facial recognition for fish

The Nature Conservancy’s Indonesia Fisheries program is working with Refind Technologies to identify fish. The project is called Fishface and the ultimate goal is to build this technology into a smartphone app that could be used on fishing boats throughout the region and eventually be deployed around the globe. Through the use of affordable image recognition software that will detect species from photos, much faster and more accurate sorting of fish will be possible at the processing plant, or even as it is landed on the boat.

Ultimately, the pilot of the Fishface technology will offer a low-cost assessment of fish stocks—providing the essential data needed to assess and manage fisheries that are struggling around the world.

The framework envisioned will be applied across these types of fisheries in a multitude of geographies, with the potential to impact the some 260 million people who depend on fish for income and food.

The Nature Conservancy (TNC) is the leading conservation organization working around the world to protect ecologically important lands and waters for nature and people. They are present in over 35 countries around the world.

For the second time, Refind will be exhibiting at the IERC, International Electronics Recycling Congress. As usual it will be held in Salzburg, Austria, and will bring together over 500 producers, recyclers, refurbishers and organizations from all over the world. Refind will present the latest news from the recognition technology side.

Contact us if you want to book a seat at our speed dating table - 15 minutes - we are happy to host you! Johanna Reimers & Farshid Jafari Harandi

Together with 19 other companies, Refind participates in the Ekocentrum exhibition with the unique identification technology as one of the innovations for a better and more sustainable life. The exhibition kicked off on December 1st and will continue throughout 2016.

Come and have a look at the interesting innovations from the western region of Sweden, or read more about it here: http://www.ekocentrum.se/utstallning/page/2/.

We are happy and proud to announce our participation in the Horizon2020 Research and Innovation programme in a project called SustainablySMART. The project handles sustainable smart mobile devices lifecycles through re-design, reliability, reuse and remanufacturing technologies and comprises a consortium of 17 different companies from all over Europe.

Refind’s role in the project

Our part will be to provide and improve the feeding, identification and sorting of cellphones in order to optimize the disassembly of components or preparation for reuse depending on the model or condition of the cell phone. We will provide the technology to determine brand and model of each phone, information that can be used for registration and setup instructions for the down-stream process. We will work closely with ProAutomation, an Austrian company specializing in automatic disassembly of cellphones.

More about the SustainablySMART project

Project length: 48 months, starting in September 2015 and ending in 2019.

In August Johanna Reimers took the helm as CEO in Refind Technologies. Johanna is a co-founder of the company and has been responsible for the company’s operations such as project management, customer relations and sales.

Prior to founding Refind Johanna held the same position at Optisort. Before that Johanna spent ten years in the software industry as consultant and project manager.

– I am really thrilled to take over the leadership for our great team and continue our the development of our business. We have exciting times in front ahead of us with a position as global leaders in automatic battery sorting and with the recent launch of our e-grader with potential to revolutionise the e-waste industry, says Johanna about her new mission.

An article about Refind's Jens Jonsson, leading the manufacturing of the OBS600 feeding system, in NLT - Nya Lidköpings-Tidningen. The manufacturing takes place at Väner-Tekno, our single largest sub-supplier, located in Lidköping.

Refind's CEO Hans Eric Melin together with Robert Egan and Thomas Bjarnemark, Chairman and CEO of Battery Solutions

We are happy to announce that Battery Solutions, the leading battery recycler in the US, has agreed to purchase the OBS 600 system for automatic sorting of waste batteries. With the system Battery Solutions will be able to sort over 2000 lbs (1 tonne) per hour which will make the sorting much more efficient and will also enable collection of sorting data including brand, model, size and type.

We are really thrilled over this. Battery Solutions is a very professional and solid company with a long history in battery recycling. We will now work closely together in order to make both collection and sorting more efficient when several states increasingly are facing increased collection requirements not least for primary batteries.

Battery Solutions has one of the world’s most sophisticated alkaline recovery processes that yields a recycling efficency rate over 80 per cent. With the automatic sorting the this will create a very strong offer for companies and consumers that responsibly want to recycle their dead batteries.

We are proud to have been selected as one of the 25 most promising cleantech startups in the Nordic (Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland) in the Nordic Cleantech Open competition. An international jury of more than 50 influential representatives from multinational companies and venture capital have been involved in selecting this year's top 25.

For us this is a real honor not least as Scandinavia is a very competitive space for cleantech companies. We are also happy to see two other recycling technology companies on the list which we believe shows resources efficiency is becoming an increasingly important area.

We made a short movie about our new grade-sorter for cell phones and mobile electronics: The e-grader. With a speed of 2000 objects per hour it can classify cell phones down to make and model, grade the products into different value categories based on current market price.

This is the first of its kind and we are so happy to finally fully commissioned it. The equipment is intended for ITADs and electronics collectors who now very efficiently can classify collected electronics and save as much as possible for reuse while the less valuable material are sent to recycling.

Want to know more. Send an email to our CEO Hans Eric Melin who will tell you everything about it: hanseric.melin@refind.se

It finally happened - we visited the Radio museum here in our neighborhood! Great collection of stylish old radios and communication devices, but when it comes to batteries we beat them in volumes...! #lindholmen #radiomuseet #batteries #radio